Thursday, February 24, 2011

There are days in writing this blog when I know I don't put out my best material. I usually feel it as soon as I hit the little orange "Publish Post" box in the lower left corner, but my fears are often re-affirmed by comments from readers which tell me I blew the blogpost.

Luckily, however, I'm able to put all of that behind me and come out blogging the following day. Call it resilience, or call it obliviousness; here I am the next day, ready for glory but also ready for more punishment. Let's get it on.

Can closer Jonathan Broxton recover from the worst three-month stretch of his career?

"I'll be fine this year," Broxton said. And Manager Don Mattingly, who has selected the two-time All-Star his closer, says the same. But neither player nor coach can identify a reason for Broxton's late-2010 slump.

Broxton, 26, has chosen an anti-intellectual — or is it actually uber-intellectual? — approach to solving his problems, as has long been his custom. As a closer, he says he's been conditioned to forget about a blown save. He won't change just because there were seven of them last year.

The soft-spoken but hard-throwing Georgian says he never bothered to examine what went wrong over his last 31 appearances, when he had a 7.58 earned-run average and was temporarily displaced as the Dodgers' closer.

He dismisses radar-gun readings that indicated he had lost a couple of ticks off his fastball by questioning the accuracy of the speed-measuring devices. He says he "might have gotten into some bad habits," but claims to not know what they were. The closest he comes to acknowledging that conditioning might have been an issue is by revealing that this year he started running a month earlier than usual.

"Get my legs under me a little more," he said.

Asked how he can have so much faith that everything will return to the way it used to be without the benefit of logic or the examination of empirical evidence, Broxton replies, "I don't know. Maybe it's instinct. You played your whole life. You know how to throw."

I don't know. Maybe it's instinct. Maybe it's being able to type 80 wpm. You write your whole life. You know how to blog.